Best of The Zombieslayer

The Best of The Zombieslayer

Some people shouldn't be parents

August 11, 2005

I rarely hate anyone. Of all the people I've met in my whole life, I've liked well over 99% of them. That's why I'm a firm believer that most people are good, and if good people were given freedom, bad people would get squashed.

Tipper Gore, I hated. In the mid-80s, my favorite things were football, heavy metal music, and Dungeons and Dragons. Yeah, I know it's funny to hear about a metalhead athlete who played D&D, but I did along with several of my other football buddies, along with some straight up geeks too. There goes another stereotype.

Well, Tipper Gore tried to ban two of my sacred loves - heavy metal music and Dungeons and Dragons. You know those little warning labels on albums? Those were the compromise. She really wanted my albums off the shelves for good. She apologized about it years later, but I don't buy apologies. "Sorry I tried to ban your music." No, I don't buy that.

"Dungeons and Dragons is a pathway to Satanism." No, parental neglect is a pathway to Satanism. In fact, most of the people I played D&D with were God-loving Christians, and they were all wonderful people. We played as good characters fighting against evil. It was like taking Narnia and making a game out of it. I don't think I need to inform anyone that Narnia was written by one of the greatest Christian scholars of the past century.

I have known real life Satanists. You know what they all had in common? Their parents were too busy to spend time with them. So they did anything they could for attention.

I had the misfortune of working with someone who idolized Tipper Gore. He thought the government should censor music, because he "didn't have time" to check out what his kids were listening to. I responded that if he didn't have time to parent his kids then he shouldn't be a parent. He flipped out. Responsible parent he was not and of course he got mad because I called him on it.

The other extreme you've probably all seen too. They're the parents that think that any problem with children can be solved by throwing money at them. Once again though, they never consider that maybe the kids need quality time with them. I saw this all the time at the daycares my wife worked at. Parents tossed money at the kids like someone at a strip club throwing money at a stripper, but do you think they ever spent time with the kids? Nothing against money, but these people mistake money for parenting skills.

Yes, simply put, parents should parent their kids. Not the government, not Tipper Gore, not the village but parents. Parents have been successfully raising their children for hundreds of thousands of years. If we manage somehow to not blow ourselves up, parents will successfully raise their children for thousands of years more, unless of course they want to pass off the responsibility to the government like a lot of these selfish people do.

If someone is too busy to parent their children, then they should have put some thought into it before they popped them out. He should have kept it in his pants and she should have kept her legs closed. It's people like these who are producing the brats that everyone else is sick of.

Shootin' Political Correctness in the head since May 2005. If you're soft skinned or weak at heart, you might want to try elsewhere.